“What is hostility?” asked the therapist Moses alias I Alcohol in one of his talks. “What is hostility?” he repeated, and when the silence in the lecture theater became unbearable he presented, and subsequently dictated, the definition of hostility to the forlorn alcos. “Hostility,” wrote the half-dead army in sluggish unison, “hostility is rage,” wrote Simon along with all the others, “hostility is rage directed against someone or something.” Simon read the definition he’d written down in a cheap sixty-page notebook; his mind cleared, and he suddenly felt uneasy. In Simon’s opinion, if he had been able to express his opinion, an excessive clarity of mind leads to nervous disorders. To know something fully means not to have any reserves of knowledge on a given subject, and when a person has no reserves they feel foolish; at such times a person feels as if they were about to run out of cigarettes. Not “a person” but I Simon, not “they” but I Jerzy. And not “feels,” but “drinks. .”
•
Could the cute young she-therapist Kasia have been right? Was it actually possible I no longer felt like writing about drinking? Or maybe I no longer felt like writing because I no longer felt like drinking? As I wrote I was trying to keep up with my writing about drinking and with my giving up drinking, and I lost the chase, or maybe I won the chase? Or maybe the same thing happened to me that happened to Marcel Proust? Pourquoi pas? Warum nicht? Pochemu nyet? In Proust — an interpretation I remember from Professor Błoński’s lectures twenty-eight years ago — in Proust then, the lost time of the hero is the recovered time of the narrator. With me it’s almost the same: I, Jerzy the narrator, am not only recovering the lost time of the Drunkard protagonist, I’ve also found the thing he has been looking for in vain from the very first sentence. On the way I’m recovering the wasted, drunk-away time of the other characters. Between myself and my characters there are at times very few differences. (There’s no contradiction here with what is said elsewhere in this epic poem.) Between myself and myself there are also only a few subtle distinctions; because of this it may even be the case that the Drunkard is the narrator, while Jerzy is searching in vain for a last love before death, and when it comes down to it they are interchangeable.
In other words not Don Juan the Rib but I Don Juan the Rib. Not Dr. Granada but I Dr. Granada. Not Nurse Viola but I Nurse Viola. Und so weiter.
I don’t speak any foreign languages, but the she-therapists exert such a profound influence on me that I sometimes have the feeling that any minute now I’m going to start speaking foreign languages. My German, sent to sleep in my childhood, will awaken; my schoolboy Russian will grow khorosho in both spoken and written form; my never properly learned English will become proper. Speaking in tongues would not be the strangest thing to happen on the alco ward.
Simon Pure Goodness looks around at the countenances of his comrades in arms gathered in the lecture theater and he sees how after a week, or three weeks, or a month, those countenances have become less puffy and more refined, while noses lose their redness and eyes acquire a twinkle. The Hero of Socialist Labor has changed beyond recognition. Just recently his head was still as tumid as a neon light, his tufts of gray hair in disorder, his clothing awry, his hands atremble. And now how does he look? A slim, tan masculine face, a mane of hair, a smart red-and-black checked flannel shirt, hands firmly and precisely gripping a cup of ersatz coffee. The Hero of Socialist Labor now looks like Clint Eastwood’s older brother.
The alcos recover their sight, their hearing, and their speech. The Most Wanted Terrorist in the World, par exemple. I don’t know if I mentioned this, but an additional obstacle in writing down the Terrorist’s chaotic stories was the fact that he spoke in a hoarse inaudible whisper. It was the famous voice of the actor Jan Himilsbach at the point where it had almost completely disappeared, the vocal chords reduced to ashes. And now? A few weeks later? Now the Most Wanted Terrorist in the World not only speaks in such a way that he can be understood, now the Most Wanted Terrorist in the World speaks in such a way that immortalizing his speech is a task of the first importance. He stops me in the hallway and whispers confidentially in my ear:
“Don’t worry, Jerzy, don’t worry, they’ll find a medicine to cure our illness. I mean, they found something for Johnson’s.”
“If the graduates of this academy can go from apathetic muteness to the lucid production of such memorable turns of phrase in the space of a few short weeks,” whispers Christopher Columbus the Explorer to himself in rapturous admiration, “if that’s the case, then from now on, in the box marked Education on forms, I’m going to write that I have two degrees: one in philosophy and one in alcohology.”
Or the Sugar King. I’ve not written much about him because I don’t much like him. But he too has one affecting characteristic: he’s sensitive to the beauty of nature and the fate of stray animals. The entire army of alcos is almost without exception sensitive to the beauty of nature and the fate of stray animals. At dusk, wandering shades can be seen in the fields — the alcos are picking wild flowers. Legs afflicted with polyneuropathy carry them across the steaming meadows between the dormitories of the insane. The luxuriant bouquets decorate nightstands; the scent of cornflowers, camomile, and mimosa fills the ward like tear gas. They sleep, stifled by the smell and by their own weeping. In the dormitories of the insane, orange lights burn all night long; caterwauling can be heard at the foot of the walls. The innumerable cats have it good at this infirmary for paranoids. It’s impossible to look out of a barred or unbarred window and not see a band of felines crossing from one wing to another or moving from the forensic building to the neurology ward. There are more cats here than alcos, schizos, and suicides put together. And in the depths of the Sugar King’s unfeeling soul there is a great love of cats. Every evening the Sugar King wraps the paltry remains of his hospital dinner in a torn-out page from Gazeta Wyborcza and sneaks off to the day ward. From the opposite direction, from behind the brick wall, he’s met by an almost completely black cat by the name of Sky Pilot — he’s almost completely black, but round his neck he has a white mark that really does look like a dog collar. As to whether Sky Pilot and the Sugar King are dear friends, the answer is unclear. It’s unclear because for the sake of the Sugar King it does not wish to be in the negative.
Sky Pilot eats the leftover cold frankfurters or plain sausage; he sniffs unenthusiastically at an undercooked piece of chicken and for a moment, as if out of distraction, he lets the Sugar King pick him up. From behind the dingy windows of the neurology ward the patients, motionless as cadavers, watch a thickset man in an emerald-green track suit stroking and cuddling a cat; he presses his face to the dark fur and cries, tears running down the animal’s pitch-black coat. The Sugar King has been reminded of sorry things — a life wasted, parties long over, women lost. When did the Sugar King last pick up a cat? During the occupation? Under Stalinism? Not any later than that, for sure.